The BBC’s Creative Archive is well underway now and a group of UK-based copyright activists and concerned license-payers have gotten together to lend their support to the project. The Archive is a project to put the BBC’s enormous archive on the net for free viewing and remixing by the license-paying public. If the Beeb pulls this off, it will be the largest and most ambitious open-content project in the history of the world; a shining proof of the idea that the sky doesn’t fall when you relax your copyright a little. I mean, we’re talking the future of public service broadcasting here.
So the Friends of the Creative Archive are a bunch of concerned people who want to keep this on track. It’s certain that there’s going to be a lot of opposition to this — from rights-holders, commercial broadcasters, even parts of the Beeb. But at the end of the day, the license-payers bought that programming, and it’s not doing us any good sitting on the BBC’s shelves.
You can help: if you’re a license payer, you can join the Friends, and there will be lots of opportunities in the near future to petition the Beeb, the Governors, the DCMS and Parliament for this — there’s an open letter now that you can sign onto.
Here are some of the elements critical to the creation of a real, useful, relevant Creative Archive:
* It must be broad: drawing from all areas of the BBC’s broadcasting from factual to light entertainment, from drama to sport, and everything in between.
* It must be accessible: files must be made available in open, standards-defined formats without “digital rights management” or other technology locks that will keep Britons from creatively re-using the BBC’s offerings.
* It must be free: Material should be licensed under conditions that do not restrict any licence payer from accessing, storing, modifying or sharing archive material for non-commercial use.
* It must be whole: Material should be provided in its entirety for non-commercial use, not only in excerpted form.
* It must be soon: the BBC’s own internally produced material should be released into the Archive as soon as possible, to prove to the world that the sky won’t fall if you relax your copyright stance.
* It must be complete: the BBC should take steps to clear the rights to the independently produced material in its archive.
* It must be sustainable: the BBC’s new licensing agreements with independents should all include the right for the BBC to make the works available in the Creative Archive for full non-commercial use.